Engaging Ideas - 4/13/2017

Every week we curate stories and reports on complex issues. This week: Why it’s time to embrace forms of political engagement other than elections. A new analysis of 44 studies on incentive-pay programs for teachers. New York adopts tuition-free college. How to (or how you won’t) find prices for medical procedures.

Opportunity/Inequality

Report:
Economic Mobility in America: A State-of-the-Art Primer
(Archbridge Institute)
The estimates constitute a comprehensive suite of mobility measures. The report
also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of summary measures in assessing
the extent of equal opportunity. An up- to-the-minute literature review on
levels of American economic mobility is included in an appendix.

Can the
American republic survive extreme economic inequality?
(Washington Post)
Ganesh Sitaraman wrote his new book, “The Crisis of the Middle-Class
Constitution,” before voters went to the polls in November. But he saw enough
in the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders primary campaigns to assess the
significance of the election. “After thirty years of a collapsing middle
class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck
in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional
system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the
people revolted.”

How I
Learned to Take the SAT Like a Rich Kid (The New York Times)
I realized that they didn’t just want to score exceptionally well on the SAT.
They were gunning for a score on the Preliminary SAT exams that would put them
in the top percentile of students in the United States and make them National
Merit Scholars in the fall. It was disconcerting. The majority of low- and
middle-income 11th graders I know in Michigan didn’t even sit for the
preliminary exams. Most took the SAT cold.

How Are
Charters and District Schools Working Together? In Many Ways
(EdWeek)
The number of school districts and charter schools that are interested in
actively working together is on the rise, according to Robin Lake, the director
of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington,
which researches district-charter collaborations and provides technical assistance
to districts and charter schools looking to work together.

Idaho
gives education money directly to teenagers to manage themselves
(Hechinger Report)
Every seventh grader gets $4,125 to spend on early college credits. “If the money was the thing that stopped you, that’s not going to stop you anymore, unless you’re just being lazy,” Senior Cassandra Madrigal, 17, said. With her allotment, she’ll easily cover the cost of this year’s AP tests and her Boise State University-certified statistics class..

Higher Education & Workforce Development

An
Interstate Transfer Passport: Its Time Has Come (New
England Journal of Higher Education)
The early results for the Interstate Passport program are beginning to come in.
As of February 2017, 21 institutions in six states were formal members of the
Interstate Passport Network. Institutions in an additional 10 states are
exploring or preparing to apply for membership. A total of 9,082 student
passports were issued in fall 2016—the first term they could be awarded.

New
York Adopts Free Tuition (Inside Higher Ed)
SUNY and CUNY students from families with incomes up to $125,000 will not pay
tuition. But some aid experts are alarmed by requirement that graduates stay in
state for same number of years they receive the benefit.

Health Care

Survey:
1 in 5 patients comparison-shop for healthcare (Fierce
Health Care)
Many Americans want access to price transparency tools for healthcare, but they
continue to run into roadblocks when they seek information on costs for
services. A nationwide survey conducted by Public Agenda found that about half
of patients in the U.S. have tried to find how much their healthcare would cost
before going to get care, but 63% said that there is not enough information on
costs available.

The
real metric for fixing health care (American Thinker)
Patients in Tennessee are seeing insurers drop out of the Obamacare exchanges
like flies – another reminder that America's signature health care program has
serious problems with dire consequences. Both major political parties
acknowledge Obamacare's woes, but different metrics for fixing these problems
have made civil and rational discussion impossible.